There’s so much talk about the death of print that it’s easy to just shrug and assume, with Twain-like detachment, that rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. It’s true, though: print is on the way out, and web content is the new standard for media and information… a fact that many traditional publishers are having a hard time accepting, even as they’ve had a decade to shift their content and focus online. They simply can’t accept no longer being the de facto purveyors of news and information.

Understandable, but unfortunately, numbers don’t lie: 2010 was the first year where money spent advertising online beat money spent advertising in print newspapers… and it’s only going to get worse from here.

The data comes from eMarketer, a data center and analysis firm. CEO Geoff Ramsey notes that the fall of print advertising is “something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point. Marketers are devoting bigger shares of their budgets to digital media as they see more customers shifting time toward the Web.”

The numbers? Newspaper ad revenues from both online and print publications equal $25.7 billion this year, while ad networks on the rest of the internet are spending $25.8 billion.

This is the reason newspapers are keeling over all over the country: newspapers have grown complacent with their dominance, bloated through their reliance upon exorbitant advertising revenues that have no dried up. The web, though, is a tighter, faster beast which rewards the quick and values the small transaction.

Ramsey’s right: this is the tipping point. Newspapers better figure out how to work a lot more like blogs if they want to not go extinct entirely in the coming decade.